Video: Simulating chalky white paint

I've saved my changes as Good-looking paint.psd and in this exercise, we're going to add these white accents of war paint that you see in the Final Na'vi girl.psd file and I'm going to go ahead and merge in the yellow war paint as well, these little yellow dollops right. And we're going to integrate the texture and we're going to add the inner Bevel effect, the whole number. So let's go back to Good-looking paint.psd and I'm going to switch over to the Channels panel, scroll down the list and you can see this alpha channel right there called white paint and I'd like to take a close look at it.

In the all-new Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Mastery, the third and final installment of the popular series, join industry expert and award-winning author Deke McClelland for an in-depth tour of the most powerful and empowering features of Photoshop CS5. Discover the vast possibilities of traditional tools, such as masking and blend modes, and then delve into Smart Objects, Photomerge, as well as the new Puppet Warp, Mixer Brush, and HDR features. Exercise files accompany the course.

Simulating chalky white paint

I've saved my changes as Good-looking paint.psd and in this exercise, we'regoing to add these white accents of war paint that you see in the FinalNa'vi girl.psd file and I'm going to go ahead and merge in the yellow war paint as well,these little yellow dollops right. And we're going to integrate the texture andwe're going to add the inner Bevel effect, the whole number.So let's go back to Good-looking paint.psd and I'm going to switch over to theChannels panel, scroll down the list and you can see this alpha channel rightthere called white paint and I'd like to take a close look at it.

I'm looking at this white paint layer going holy moley, what did I do right there.All of a sudden, I have this really sharp edge.That ends up not really affecting the final composition because of theluminance blending, so it ends up dropping out, but maybe I should get rid ofit in the first place.So I'll go grab my Brush tool, what the heck, by pressing the B key of courseand I'll reduce the size of my cursor a little bit and I've already got myforeground color set to black. That's handy.So I'm just going to paint kind of along that edge to make some of it go away,like so, and good enough, what the heck.

It's going to look great after all.It looked good when it was a problem, so why wouldn't it look good after it got fixed.I want to make sure though that my alpha channel matches the image, of courseso I could scroll up to the top and click on that eyeball, but I wanted to tellyou about a shortcut.Instead of going to all the trouble of finding an RGB image and clicking on itseyeball, you can just press the tilde key, and the Tilde key is the one directlyabove the tab key into to the left of the 1 key on an American keyboard.It's kind of a crazy keyboard shortcut.It's left over from back when you press Ctrl+Tilde or Cmd+Tilde on theMac in order to switch to RGB, you don't do that anymore but you stillcontrol the display this way.

So press tilde to show the image at the same time you're seeing the channel,press tilde again to hide that image. All right.So anyway just wanted to show you that. I'm going to zoom out and of course Iwanted to fix the mask because it had problems.I'm going to scroll down to this white paint channel and I'm going to Ctrl+Clickon it or Cmd+Click on it to convert it into a selection outline.Then I'm going to switch back to the image which I can do by the way by pressingCtrl+2 or Cmd+2 on a Mac, assuming default settings and I'm going to press the Mkey to switch back to the rectangular marquee.

All right, let's make a new layer called white paint.It's going to be another adjustment layer incidentally, so make sure your cyanpaint layer is active, go to the Adjustments panel, you'll see theHue/Saturation Settings because cyan paint is currently active.So to make a new layer, you return to your adjustment list by clicking this leftpointing arrow head in the bottom-left corner of the panel and once again, we'regoing to do this with Hue/Saturation because it happens to work out great.So I'm going to Alt+Click or Option+ Click this second icon in, on the second rowthat guy right there, and then I'm going to call this one white paint of course,and click OK. And the values I'm going to enter may kind of surprise you.

I'm going to change the Hue value to -20, and then I'm going to Tab down toSaturation and do nothing with it and then I'm going to increase myLightness value to +15. That's it.That's the end of the adjustment layer.It doesn't look very good at all.It doesn't look like, a) That it's integrated into the skin tones at all, nor doesit look particularly white or chalky.Well, if you want to make it nice and white and chalky then we need to go aheadand switch to the Screen blend mode and that's going to bring things out quitenicely, so now we have kind of a little bit of a chalky effect.

I don't believe it for a minute though because it's not integrated into thetextures of the face, so once again we're going to take advantage ofLuminance Blending.Now, so far I've been showing you that you can go to the Layers panel menu andyou can choose the Blending Options Cmd or press my keyboard shortcut there,there is another way to work though.It's just that it's a little bit problematic until you get used to it.You can double-click on the layer, but here's the thing, you got to double-clickon the right part of the layer.If you double-click on the adjustment thumbnail, you'll bring up the Adjustmentspanel, so that's not right.

If you double-click on this little chain icon, you're going to turn off and thenback on the link between the adjustment and its mask.If you double-click on the layer mask thumbnail, you're going to bring up LayerMask Display Options and if you double- click on the name of the layer, you'regoing to change the layer name. So what you do?Well you move off to anything else.Some empty area, and you double-click there, and that brings up the Layer Style dialog box.Just yet another secret handshake inside Photoshop, and we're going to go down tothe ultimate secret handshake in my opinion, which is this Underlying Layerslider, and I'm going to take that black triangle up to 30, so anything with aluminance level of 30 or darker from the underlying imagesis going to force it's way through, so these very dark details in the eyebrowsare showing through the white paint.

And now so that we have more natural transitions, I'm going to Alt+Drag orOption+Drag the right half of this black triangle over to a 100 and we get thiseffect right here, looks pretty darn good.I'll click OK in order to accept the modifications.Now we need to add that depth using the Bevel and Emboss effect, but there's no wayI want to go into that dialog box and Enter all those values again, andthankfully I don't have to, because you can copy an effect from one layer toanother just by pressing the Alt key once again or the Option key on a Mac anddragging Bevel and Emboss on to white paint and dropping, like so.

Now you saw just a moment ago, I'll undo that modification, you saw how I've got thislittle fx icon that appears as I do the drag-and-drop, that appears on a PC.It doesn't necessarily appear on the Mac, so that's platform specific, but it is really cool.But anyway notice that I went ahead and duplicated the effect, thanks to thefact that I Alt+Dragged or Option+Dragged.It's very important.I duplicated the effect onto the white paint layer.All right now we have yellow paint on top, turn it on, you'll see that italready has its own Bevel and Emboss effect.

It's the exact same one.Now I created this layer differently, I didn't use the Hue/Saturationadjustment layer this time, I just painted these tiny little blobs using abrush set to yellow.That's it and then I added Bevel and Emboss and the only thing we need to dowith it because notice its covering up other war paint in the image.So we don't need to reveal skin texture, all we need to do is make the pigmentsblend with each other a little bit and I'm going to do that by changing theblend mode to Multiply, like that there.We have now created all of the war paint inside of this image, just for the sakeof tidiness, I'm going to go ahead and tuck these guys under here, so that I'mcollapsing all of the layer effects.

I'm going to click on yellow paint, I'm going to Shift+Click on cyan paint.I'm going to go to my Layers panel menu and choose New Group from Layers togroup them together, don't have to do that. Again, I'm just being tidy man here.And I'll go ahead and name this group war paint, and that's it.Click OK and we have now applied all of the war paint to the Na'vi's face.The next step is to bring in this background foliage, which is really appearingin the foreground, and we'll do that in the next exercise.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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